Via twitter and Hibernate forums, @astralbodies seems to be doing some interesting high performance *writing* stuff with Hibernate Search, but in his experience Hibernate Search on disk is pretty fast, not so the Search + Infinispan combination. http://twitter.com/#!/practicallyUX/statuses/126774913884360704 In my own tests, we are quite faster than Lucene's FSDirectory even while this uses MMap and NIO tricks, but indeed writing to a sync CacheLoader will slow it down significantly, and since the performance battle was won by a small margin only (close to 3X); I never recommend a cacheloader in sync, but async introduces some limitations too (most notably ISPN-1174, which can lead to critical errors with Lucene). background, actually an interesting read: https://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1013032 Besides pointing out the Cassandra CacheLoader, I think that at some point we should spend some time tuning & testing the FS CacheLoader to remove it's "experimental" flag and actually suggest using it. Sanne